Disciple of the Wind (57 page)

“That’s not why I’m calling. I need to talk to Norika.”

“All things in due time. Status report.”

“Fine. I found a couple hundred kids in the Shinagawa rail yard,” she said. “I think they’re all alive; I sent cops that way to make sure. Now here’s the important bit: they’re keeping the kids in different groups. I think that’s why you didn’t pick up anything when you analyzed traffic patterns: they’re not all going to one place.”

“How many locations?”

“I don’t know. I know Joko Daishi is on his way to the first batch right this minute.” If he’s not there already, she thought. If the slaughter hasn’t already begun. “He’s going to some place his people call ‘the new church.’ Norika was close to him,
neh
? Like his concubine or something? Put her on the line; she might know where this church is.”

“Young lady, you need to learn your place. I will not be ordered about by a—”

“Save it. I get enough of that shit at work.” Mariko kneaded her temple with her free hand. A tension headache was settling in; it felt like steel cables pulled taut under her skin. “Look, either she knows where the ‘new church’ is or she doesn’t. Which is it?”

“Norika-san has given a full report about the Divine Wind’s internal structure. This includes the locations of many churches. I have people investigating each one, including the newest.”

“How long is that going to take?”

“You’re a detective, Oshiro-san. You of all people ought to know how hard it is to answer that question. It takes as long as it takes.”

Those steel cables pulled tighter. She needed a list of the locations
Norika identified. Then she could figure out which ones could house a thousand kids and a bunch of whack-job cultists. As soon as the thought struck her, she realized it wasn’t especially clever. Furukawa must have thought of it already, and performed the same process of elimination she would have carried out, except much faster, with many more resources. The only question was how much he was willing to share with Mariko.

“Have you found him already?” she asked.

“No.”

“If you had, would you tell me?”

“Of course.”

It was a stupid question and a hollow answer; if he was lying, she had no way of proving it. But it didn’t gain her anything to assume he was holding out on her. “Look,” she said, “I don’t think we can wait any longer. If we can’t find Joko Daishi, then we have to make him come to us.”

“Oh? What do you have in mind?”

“He needs his mask. He wants my sword. Let’s give them to him.”

“Hm.” Furukawa sipped something. Ice clinked against crystal. “He does have people watching your apartment—or at least he did when last I checked. If we move the mask, he should learn of it soon.”

“Make sure. Let it leak throughout your organization. You said he still has moles in the Wind,
neh
?”

“We must assume so, yes.”

“Then get the word out.”

Mariko felt something release in her chest, like a fist loosening up. It felt good to make progress, even if she hadn’t actually accomplished anything yet. At this point, even an idea was good enough.

“It’s a dangerous gambit,” Furukawa said. “He believes the mask gives him divine power. And he is very clever. If he manages to steal the bait from off the hook, he may go on to do much worse than we’ve seen so far.”

“How can it get worse than kidnapping and murdering over a thousand children?”

“How could it get worse than bombing an airport? Before this morning, Haneda was the worst we’d ever seen.” He took a sip from whatever he was drinking, and much too calmly for Mariko’s liking. She would have liked to hear those ice cubes jingling, as if held by a nervously quivering hand. “You ask how much worse it can get? I ask you, do we want to leave it to Joko Daishi to answer that question?”

Now Mariko’s hands were shaking. “Good point. But I don’t see any other choice. I don’t want to just sit back and wait.”

“No, that isn’t your style, is it?” Furukawa was almost jovial. He seemed to find her impatience adorable. “Very well. We’ll do it your way. There’s a pool hall called Kikuchi Billiards. Do you know it?”

“Is it anywhere near Kikuchi Park?”

“Across the street, in fact. We maintain a safe house there. I’ll send the mask and sword. Can you beat them there?”

“I’ll leave right now. I’ll see if I can get a SWAT team on site too.”

“And if not?”

“Then I’ll see how many yakuzas I can have waiting for him. It’s all pool balls,
neh
? The Bulldog is as bloodthirsty as they come. If he isn’t willing to help me find Joko Daishi, maybe he’s willing to take a shot at him if I put the fucker in front of him.”

“Well, now. That’s most insidious of you, Detective Oshiro. You may be one of us after all.”

Absolutely not, Mariko thought, but I’m counting on you being right about all the destiny stuff. She’d promised Shoji not to harm her son. If Shoji and Furukawa were right about Joko Daishi’s fate, then Kamaguchi firepower
couldn’t
kill him. Neither could SWAT. Only Mariko could do that. But if they were wrong, she had practically called for Joko Daishi’s execution. Not a bad outcome, Furukawa would say, but Mariko made a promise to a friend and she didn’t intend to break it. Besides, she’d be right there with him; she might end up in the cross fire herself.

Her phone beeped and she saw another call coming in. She hoped to see Han’s name there; instead she saw the last name she’d expect.

“Hang on,” she told Furukawa. “I have to take this.” Then she clicked over to the other call.

“It’s me,” said the Bulldog. His rasping voice was unmistakable.

“Long time, no hear,” Mariko said. “What’s it been, half an hour?”

“Don’t get cute. I changed my mind about those kids, but if you decide to fuck with me, I’ll change it right back.”

He sounded angry. “Are you okay, Kamaguchi-san?”

The breath came loud through his nostrils, blowing harshly over his phone’s mouthpiece. “Those sissies who poisoned all those people at the hospital, they’re the same ones who took the kids?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then fuck ’em. I’ll help you bury them.”

“Um . . . can I ask why?”

Another snort into the phone. “I got a girlfriend. Turns out she was pregnant. I didn’t even know. She never told me; she just went to the hospital to have it taken care of. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.”

“She came out of there sick. Like I said, I didn’t even know she went in. Now I get this fucking phone call telling me she didn’t make it. Looks like ricin.”

“Oh.” That brought the ricin death toll to twenty-four. No one would even hear about it, not in the shadow of the largest mass kidnapping in history. “I’m sorry, Kamaguchi-san. That’s horrible.”

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m going to help you find these cocksuckers, but for a price. I want the ringleader. I’m going to beat him to death with his own fucking mask.”

Mariko had some experience with that. Unconsciously she ran a finger over the line of stitches Norika had left in her scalp. “You know I can’t make that deal.”

“No? Then there’s no deal. Simple as that.”

“Come on, Kamaguchi-san. You’re asking a cop to turn a blind eye to premeditated murder. You have to know that’s not going to fly.”

His nasal breath roared like an airplane engine over his phone’s
tiny receiver. “I’m asking a
suspended
cop. That’s why you’re calling me: because you can’t call your own people. Am I wrong?”

“No.” There was no point in lying. He had his police connections, just as she had hers in the
boryokudan
.

“Then we play it my way. I been asking around, seeing if my people seen anything you’re looking for. You want to find a place that’ll hold thirteen hundred kids,
neh
?”

“Or close to it, yeah.”

“I’m thinking somewhere out of the way—somewhere not too many people are going to notice when those kids start screaming.”

“Yes.” Mariko shivered; his cold logic gave her the creeps.

“Last thing: it’s got to be somewhere that no one will look twice if a bunch of vehicles show up out of the blue—say, a bunch of light trucks.”

“You know something. Tell me.”

“You’re going to love this.” Kamaguchi paused as if waiting for a drum roll. “Haneda airport.”

“What?”

“Some pretty cherry contracts went out for the cleanup and reconstruction. I made sure a Kamaguchi company got a couple of them. Heh. We’re going to make a million yen a day out there.”

“How nice for you. Get to the point.”

“Women! Always so damn touchy.” She could almost hear him shaking his head. “All right, here it is: Terminal 2 is huge,
neh
? Those bombs really only took out the lobby, but they had to shut down the whole terminal. It’ll be months before anyone can fly out of there again. That leaves plenty of places to hide—big, dark places where no one’s got any reason to go. So my foreman down there, he sees a bunch of trucks running in and out of the south end this morning. He doesn’t think anything of it until I ask him, but then he says yeah, he hasn’t seen them before.”

“It’s brilliant.” Mariko just blurted it out. She didn’t want to think it, much less say it, but Joko Daishi was a genius. He’d taken hiding in
plain sight to a new level. First he transformed Haneda into an international symbol for terrorism, then he camped out right inside it. But the Bulldog was right: strange vehicles would be running in and out of there for months to come. No one would think twice about them. And since all the reconstruction efforts were centered on the bomb site, no one there had any cause to explore the rest of the terminal.

“South end of Terminal 2,” she said. “You’re positive?”

“Yes, I’m fucking positive. What did I just say?”

“And you say
I’m
bitchy and temperamental. Chill out, Kamaguchi-san. I’m just doing my job.”

“Then do it. And when you find that cocksucker, you bring him to me. That’s the deal.”

“I’ll do you one better,” Mariko said. “Kikuchi Billiards, across the street from Kikuchi Park. You know the place?”

“What about it?”

“Joko Daishi’s on his way now,” Mariko said, hoping to hell that she could get cops there too. If not, she had just set up a hit. “You head there, you’ll find him.”

“Done,” said the Bulldog.

He hung up. That brought Furukawa back on the line. “Norika’s churches are a dead end,” Mariko said. “The ‘new church’ is in the south end of Terminal 2.”

“Terminal 2?” Furukawa sounded alarmed. “You don’t mean Haneda?”

“No, McDonald’s. Of course I mean Haneda. He’s using the airport bombing as a smoke screen to hide the kidnapping.”

“Oh,
very
good. Bravo.”

Mariko rolled her eyes. “You’re disgusting. Look, I have things to do. Figure out what to do about Terminal 2. Whatever you do, only use people you trust; as soon as Joko Daishi finds out we’re onto him, he’ll start killing kids.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be very careful.”

“You better. One more thing: usually this would go without
saying, but with you . . . look, try to solve this without murdering everyone, okay?”

“As you like, Detective Oshiro.”

He said it as if she’d asked him for extra sprinkles on her ice cream sundae. Mariko shook her head, sighed in exasperation, and hung up. Then she put the BMW in gear and doubled back toward Shinagawa Station.

She called Han along the way. “Hey,” she said, “you find them?”

“Three hundred and sixty-five of them,” said Han.

“Jesus.” Did Joko Daishi plan to kill one a day for an entire year? Or set one free every day? Or did he just want everyone to leap to wild conclusions, and to be perpetually terrified of what would come next? Mariko supposed it didn’t matter. These kids were safe; the Divine Wind wasn’t getting them back. But that still left over nine hundred children unaccounted for. With luck, they’d all be in one place at the south end of Terminal 2. But so far all the luck was blowing Joko Daishi’s way.

“How soon can you get out of there?” Mariko asked.

“Right now, I guess. Why?”

“Come out to the sidewalk. I’m picking you up.” Her engine roared as she gunned it through a yellow light.

“Mariko, tell me what’s going on.”

“I’ll explain everything on the way. How long do you think SWAT’s going to be tied up with those kids?”

Han thought about it for a second. “The area’s pretty well clear. We should leave a couple of guys to watch the train car. Everyone else . . . I don’t know, fifteen minutes?”

“Too long. We’ll have to call another team.” She downshifted and punched it around a big, slow newspaper truck. “You came in that SWAT van, not a cruiser,
neh
?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Damn. My car doesn’t have lights or a siren. We’d get there faster if we could run code the whole way.”

“What? Since when do you have a car?”

Just ahead, she saw Han jogging out from the access road to the rail yard. Mariko jammed on the brakes and the BMW skidded to a stop in front of him. “Holy shit, Mariko, where’d you get this?”

“Long story.”

He ran around to the opposite side and jumped in. “Nice wheels.”

“Thanks.”

Mariko peeled out into traffic. Han grabbed the door for stability, then hurriedly snapped his seat belt shut. “Okay,” he said, “you mind telling me what the hell is going on?”

“We’re going to a pool hall over by Kikuchi Park. You need to make some calls and get a SWAT presence over there, because the Kamaguchi-gumi is sending a bunch of guys with guns.”

“What? Why?” Han shook his head as if trying to shake off a knockout punch. “Mariko, I know you think we’re on our usual wavelength, but I have to tell you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sorry. Here’s the deal. Joko Daishi still has his eye on his demon mask. I’m going to put it right out where he can reach it, and I’m going to hope his obsession with the mask overrules his desire to kill hundreds of innocent children. I think this is going to be our best shot at him.”

“Hell yeah. Nice work.”